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57 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 3 From Jacaltenango to Jupiter Negotiating the Concept of “Family” through Transnational Space and Time SILVIA IRENE PALMA, CAROL GIRÓN SOLÓRZANO, AND TIMOTHY J. STEIGENGA This chapter argues that “family” is a key concept for understanding the life of the Guatemalan immigrant community living in Jupiter, Florida. Family-related necessities serve as the primary motor of emigration. Preoccupation with the family is the principle axis in the hearts, minds, and daily lives of Jupiter’s immigrants . The strength of family ties are such that they allow immigrants to accept and tolerate the many sacrifices associated with daily living in a foreign and often hostile community. At the same time, the process of conducting multiple life histories, in-depth interviews, and focus groups with Jupiter’s immigrants illuminated the heavy burden created by the distance between the immigrants, their families, and their communities of origin. As sociologist Pierrette HondagneuSotelo has argued, these burdens underlie the fundamentally ambiguous (and increasingly common) construction of transnational families. In this chapter, we argue that Jupiter’s immigrants negotiate these tensions and transnational spaces with the assistance of local organizations and through the construction and reproduction of images associated with the passage of time: images of their home communities in the past, their present realities in Jupiter, and the conceptualization of a future which for the vast majority of the recent immigrants includes a return to their community of origin. According to the  census, approximately , Guatemalans live in the state of Florida, with approximately , located in Palm Beach County. These figures, however, drastically undercount the actual number of Guatemalan immigrants in Florida. In the case of Jupiter alone, our survey research and qualitative interviews suggest that the population of Guatemalans is closer to ,, the majority from Jacaltenango, a municipality located in the department of Huehuetenango in northwest Guatemala. As outlined in chapter , the first Jacaltecos arrived in Jupiter after a long and intense displacement between countries (Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States) and between various 58 S. PALMA, C. GIRÓN, AND T. STEIGENGA locations within the United States. They arrived in Florida for diverse reasons: from the need to safeguard their lives in the context of Guatemala’s intense armed conflict of the s to more recent waves of immigrants who come as international migrant workers to fill the demand for laborers in Jupiter’s burgeoning landscaping and construction industries. In this chapter we show how Guatemalan immigrants in Jupiter fulfill their commitments to their families in their communities of origin through working to produce remittances, frequent telephone communications, and other transnational connections. We demonstrate that the immigrants experience a daily tension: the need to take on the new values of the community in which they live in the United States (modernization, personal autonomy, self-control, and institutionalized norms) while also maintaining the values they bring with them from their community of origin (community values and traditional forms of family authority). These pressures induce difficult changes in the lives of immigrants. The communal and family authorities who would normally provide behavioral limits and norms in the community of origin are absent in Jupiter. In the absence of these family and group authorities, churches and other civic organizations take on, at least in a compensatory form, the roles of family members or other local authorities in providing a framework of self-control and an understanding of “proper” behavior. In short, these institutions assist migrants in meeting their family commitments, in spite of the difficulties of space and time that create distance between families. They also provide one of the scarce sources of “bridging” social capital for Jupiter’s Guatemalan immigrants. With regard to these dynamics, we observed important differences between distinct immigrant groups such as asylum seekers/refugees and recently arrived (and more likely to be undocumented) international migrant workers, between men and women, as well as among immigrants at different stages in life. On one hand, Jupiter may be understood as a community in which Guatemalan symbols and meanings of social and cultural order are recreated. At the same time, Jupiter is a disputed space, an environment of cultural appropriation and reproduction in which immigrants insert themselves while attempting to learn a new and different set of life skills appropriate to survival in an upscale Florida community. This tension requires a sharp learning curve and produces significant psychological and emotional stress among recent immigrants. Civic and religious organizations play a key role in mediating these tensions...

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